1 : Introduction 21
external influences in ways which enriched and focused that depth and in ways which sullied
and distorted it. What was true for Reich is true for all of us. To quote the psychologist Daniel
J. Levinson: “Every man’s life gives evidence of his society’s wisdom and integration as well as
its conflicts, oppression and destructiveness.”^20
In dynamic interplay with the inner Reich, then, stood the “historical Reich”, the man
who embodied many characteristics of the authoritarian society he so sharply and brilliantly
illuminated. What was remarkable about Reich was not only his capacity to try to overcome
the ways he had internalized his society’s “conflicts, oppression and destructiveness”, but also
the way that the core Reich often creatively utilized the destructive internalizations contained
in the historical Reich. For example, Reich at times was able to employ an enormous compet-
itiveness, pride, even an arrogance very similar to his father’s, as well as the vicissitudes of his
own Oedipal strivings, in order to protect and fight for the insights his more modest, innocent,
and deeper self had discovered.
No man, then, was more a child of his particular era; no man more engaged—always
passionately, sometimes bullyingly—in the social and scientific conflicts of his time. No man
was more able to transcend the destructive and erroneous in his social inheritance, to keep in
touch with a depth of nature his times knew little of. To do so required relentless effort. In
Nietzsche’s words: “The great man fights the elements in his time that hinder his own great-
ness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity.” Reich fought just such a battle with his
age.
Through this struggle he finally saw—and saw with blinding clarity—that he had dis-
turbed the sleep of the world more fundamentally even than Freud or Marx had done.
Although his achievement was inconceivable without their precepts, he realized that he had
disturbed the world not through additions to existing systems of thought but through his own
unique perspective, the perspective of basic nature that the core Reich reflected. At last he
could distinguish this perspective by means of his struggle, never complete but yet successful,
to liberate his natural core self from the dual armor of neurotic bonds inherited from his per-
sonal life history and erroneous concepts inherited from his scientific environment.
What should our attitude be toward the emotional life of a man like Reich? As I have
suggested, nothing is easier than to distance ourselves from great figures, whether through a
negative interpretation or through idealization. Denigration and idealization are twins with the
same basic motive: to avoid taking responsibility for the discoveries before us and to avoid tak-
ing responsibility for emulating the lives of great individuals. If we find severe flaws in the per-
sonality of the “genius”, we can look upon him as some kind of genetic freak, closely linked
to the madman, whose contributions were almost an incidental offshoot of his weird person-
ality.Ifwe consider the great man a triumphant genius with a basically unflawed personality,
we can make small demands upon ourselves since we lack genius and possess flaws. Still anoth-
er way of dealing with the great man is simply through indifference. One explains his loneli-
ness and suffering through the kind of clichés Reich hated: “A genius is always one hundred
years ahead ofhis time”,or, “A genius always meets opposition in his lifetime”.
The need for distance from greatness is especially intense when we are dealing with